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** spoiler alert ** Okay, I am not the target audience for this book. One of my favorite teachers in high school was sent to one of the internment camps as a child. I’ve met Fred Korematsu, whose challenge to internship went all the way to the Supreme Court back in the day. I’ve read that opinion. I know several members of the excellent legal team that got his conviction vacated. I know the Justice Department lied to the Supreme Court about the “known danger�� the Japanese-Americans represented. My grandmother bought a house on 10th and Jefferson from a neighbor being sent away, and my boss’s family took in an ebony and ivory piano from neighbors being removed that he later, at no small expense, had restored and donated to a Buddhist temple in Wapato. I love George Takei and have exchanged tweets with him. I know about the internment camps. I am deeply ashamed of what my country did.

I am not the target audience. I am no fan of the sweet and sentimental; of pathos and wistfulness; of romance and thwarted love. And I despise Orson Scott Card, who helped get this book written, for his stalwart work on behalf of homophobia. Science fiction writers who are on the wrong side of history belong in the special hell.

I know many good people love this book. I only read it because my reading group wanted to.

I suspect, though I don’t know, that the author did not mean to write about the Japanese internment. He meant to write a thwarted love story. The author interview in the back of the book disclaims any political intent, which baffles me. Given the opportunity to clearly condemn �� or even defend -- the internment, he evades. I don’t get that. The most he can come up with is "beloved president Reagan apologized." When asked if he saw a parallel between the calls to close the border or remove Muslim Americans, he seemed astonished that there might be one.

I do not love President Reagan. The parallel is bleeding and raw and recognized by George Bush himself, as well as lots of Japanese-American legal organization who spoke up when it mattered.

It’s a quick read. It’s about a guy who meets a girl, falls in love with a girl, loses a girl to the Japanese internment and his father’s racism, and moves on to be a good husband to a different woman. Who dies. Opening up our guy to find his first love.

I suspect it’s one of those books that attempts to mine those “rich veins of ordinary life�� I hear that non-genre literature is lovingly mining. I almost always find such books trite and cloying. This one was no exception.

There might have been a good book in here if the author had wanted to tackle the little deeper story.